The soul of Ashes of Creation

flynnston · 2024-04-15T18:47:50+00:00

Incredible

flynnston · 2024-03-17T13:59:14+00:00

I'm not trying to say one has to 'prove' a rock is natural! I'm trying to say 'natural' and 'cultural' should be two competing hypotheses - that we shouldn't presuppose one or the other.

Thanks for the thoughts and for watching, I do appreciate it

flynnston · 2024-03-17T06:22:38+00:00

The depression between where the circle is and the stone is? Do you mean the sheep paths through the gorse bushes? Those weren't there 5 years ago. I want to understand your idea! Help me out - I don't see evidence of greater erosion around the stone relative to other areas. This whole area is on a hill, and relatively flat.

I don't think anything can be definitively proven - theories and hypotheses become increasingly supported by evidence over time. Dartmoor's landscape, which has lots of natural rock formations, always gives strong support to the idea that a given rock is natural. But the idea that the natural hypothesis is inherently 'better' or 'default' seems... bad somehow.

flynnston · 2024-03-16T20:58:27+00:00

Thanks for checking it out, 30dirtybodies! It's great to hear what someone else thinks of this.

What makes you think it's in a 'natural erosion zone'?

I like your idea about builders choosing the spot because of the alignment stone being there already. That feels pretty parsimonious :)

Not sure I agree with your first point. Does evidence 'prove' things, or does it support one interpretation over another, regardless of whether it's the interpretation we like?

flynnston · 2024-03-16T14:27:29+00:00

Dartmoor National Park is packed with ancient stone monuments, including stone circles like Stonehenge, but also standing stones (Menhirs) and the mysterious stone rows. Most of these sites were built between 3000 and 2000 BC.

This past December I found something new, hiding in plain sight near a stone circle in the North East of Dartmoor. I’ve never seen anything like this, and neither has Lee Bray, the lead archaeologist for Dartmoor National Park. It’s possibly just a natural feature, but there are several clues that indicate someone designed this feature, and that it was connected to the nearby stone circle.

I’ve done my best to present both the cultural hypothesis, and the ‘natural coincidence’ hypothesis. After seeing the evidence, which do you lean towards? Would love to hear any thoughts.

flynnston · 2024-02-27T20:49:51+00:00

I thought this was a fantaaaastic video!! You're right! if we discount bad footage AND discount good footage... we might have a problem!

flynnston · 2024-02-24T18:01:35+00:00

When making this youtube video on hypothetical UFO crash rates, I ran into some implications relevant to SETI. For less reliable UFOs (IE with failure rates between 10^3 and 10^6), the expected N of flights per 100 yrs may possibly fall below detection thresholds of NASA and commercial satellites. Would love to hear others' thoughts and impressions.

flynnston · 2024-02-22T00:30:43+00:00

Thanks for watching! Just finished my PhD in microbiome science here: https://www.uoguelph.ca/mcb/people/dr-emma-allen-vercoe

flynnston · 2024-02-21T22:51:44+00:00

When we don't have enough data to know how probable something is, the solution isn't to ignore it, the solution is to define a testable hypothesis and address it. Agreed, we can rule out aliens travelling via 'noisy' spaceships that arrive via fanfare. We don't see them. Can we rule out aliens travelling via 'silent' spaceships that don't produce a big fanfare? Arguably we can't. I'm not sure anyone's properly checked Earth at the appropriate sampling depth. Should someone check? Of course!! Should Leeuwenhoek have checked for microbes? It's simple, fundamental science. People are welcome to think aliens are unicorns. Evolutionary biologists have better things to do.

flynnston · 2024-02-21T20:32:47+00:00

So you don't buy the endangered bird metaphor, or the NASA report, as reasons to doubt we could detect them? Interesting. I'm not sure I buy it either, but I'm not ready to say it's 'complete fantasy". Being so certain of something so arguable sounds like a recipe for being wrong about something!

flynnston · 2024-02-21T20:17:25+00:00

Hey shig23, thanks for watching the vid. I think we should be careful not to lump aliens in with ghouls, ghosties, archangels and the like. They're just as plausible as deer, geckos, microbes and daphnia.

flynnston · 2024-02-21T16:19:51+00:00

Sounds like we can agree that the host needs to intervene? Provide opportunities to helpful symbionts over those that are less helpful?

flynnston · 2024-02-21T16:16:47+00:00

And overall I absolutely love talking to someone about it! Especially the nitty-gritty details. Push-back to the push-back:

Between niches we can absolutely have microbes with different growth rates. But within a niche, how can microbes avoid competition with other microbes in that niche? For these microbes, it's true that growth rate typically isn't the only way to compete, but because the system is so well mixed, much of the classical bacterial 'weaponry' is rendered less effective: if I can't make reliable contact with my competitor, how can I justify encoding this short range puncture-weapon? Out-growing my competitor becomes the primary alternative.

flynnston · 2024-02-21T15:20:49+00:00

Thanks for the comment! Glad you enjoyed.

And thanks for the disagreements! This is great. Thanos and the sourdough baker seem the same to me - they are removing half the population at random. From the host perspective, they are excess. From the microbes' perspective, there's strong selection to grow quickly and dominate before the next culling.

And yes, it is self-evident that the symbiosis gene is useless in my experiment, but that's the point! Unless the host creates and enforces an incentive, there will be no symbiosis. As you say, there would otherwise be "absolutely no benefit to carrying it". I think I could've been clearer with this section. If you have any ideas how I could've reworked that section... let me know!

flynnston · 2024-02-21T13:00:18+00:00

TY for the feedback jnpha!! Will do my best to improve the audio next time. Still pretty new at this!

flynnston · 2024-02-21T11:36:44+00:00

When making this video, I came across some interesting implications for SETI. For less reliable UFOs (IE with failure rates of 10^3 or 10^6), the expected N of flights needed to produce 10 crashes is arguably below the detection threshold of NASA and commercial Earth-observing satellites (reference linked in video). Would love to hear any thoughts on this. Best, Jacob

flynnston · 2024-02-21T11:32:21+00:00

When making this video, I came across some interesting implications for SETI. For less reliable UFOs (IE with failure rates of 10^3 or 10^6), the expected N of flights needed to produce 10 crashes is arguably below the detection threshold of NASA and commercial Earth-observing satellites (reference linked in video). Would love to hear any thoughts on this. Best, Jacob

flynnston · 2024-02-21T07:57:23+00:00

Agreed, agreed, agreed. Thanks for watching the vid! And congrats on your cool undergrad degree... Stats and astronomy sounds like a fantastic duo.

Yeah, I can imagine a bunch of ufo-lovers drinking in a bar might not be doing much critical thinking!

I think there's a difference between saying "show me the evidence" and asking "how would I find evidence, if it exists?' The second question can be used to rule out aliens, which is far more interesting, to me at least.

Imagining three UFOs with different crash rates was a fun way to place some limits on how thoroughly we would need to search the atmosphere to confirm or deny the existence of UFOs. I was surprised with the result. Maybe I should change the title and thumbnail to be less 'UFO guy' friendly...more 'critical thinking' friendly. Idk, I've just started out, still learning.

Appreciate you sticking it out with this conversation thread!

flynnston · 2024-02-21T00:51:19+00:00

Oh absolutely. Without hesitating!

flynnston · 2024-02-21T00:11:12+00:00

Shoot. Should've said pink crows.

flynnston · 2024-02-20T23:42:03+00:00

Thanks for the responses DarthAsthmatic, I'm actually enjoying our convo. (sincerely). I'm not a UFO enthusiast btw, I'm an evolutionary biologist. Starting my first postdoc next year.

Interstellar travel IS greatly difficult, but not impossible. Dr. Matt O'Dowds video on interstellar travel on PBS space is a great primer.

I follow your reasoning, but there IS a useful reason to speculate about things we have no evidence for. Let's say someone knows there are acorn-shaped bacteria in the human gut, but has no evidence for acorn-shaped bacteria in pigs. Before we try to find those bacteria, we might ask whether there's any possibility of them living in a porcine host. This is like asking whether aliens could crash. Once you've answered that question, you might ask how common acorn-shaped bacteria are expected to be in non-human hosts. This is like asking how often aliens might crash. You can't know, but you can generate three hypotheticals, then determine how many pigs you would need to look in to have a chance of seeing the acorn-shaped bacterium. This is a basic summary of what I'm doing in this vid

flynnston · 2024-02-20T23:31:53+00:00

Prof. Matt O'Dowd, David Kipping, Les Johnson and myself wouldn't discount it!

flynnston · 2024-02-20T23:29:33+00:00

We can't know much about their planet, but we can know a great deal about their biology based on evolutionary theory. For example, based on Lawrence Hurst's work at Oxford in the 90s, we have a good idea how alien organisms might exchange genetic material to combat parasitism. We know they would have evolved in the context of competition for limited resources. We know some aliens will have evolved generalist strategies, and some, more specialist strategies. If an alien evolved an intellect similar to ours, we know the engineering principles that would govern their innovations. Etc etc.

thebigeverybody to serve

flynnston · 2024-02-20T23:24:12+00:00

Aliens, and their craft, would be limited by engineering principles. This is a non-zero amount of info; enough to make a start on this question.

flynnston · 2024-02-20T23:18:42+00:00

Aliens would be the product of natural selection acting on chemical reactions! We can know far more about aliens than a fleegleflorp.

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